Dancing on the edge in Cuba

The fiction is essential: Recognize the human truth of any totalitarian country and the regime is done for.

The truth in Cuba is that sex is the only economy left. Prostitution has reached the point where it appears that one half of society is selling itself to the other. Women line the streets of Havana -- especially the road to the once-swanky Miramar district -- cheek by jowl with the police.

There is little to fear from authority: Something which does not exist cannot be arrested.

The police -- underpaid country boys -- look morose. Havana itself is semi-ruined. The few cars on the roads look like relics from a 1950s crash yard. The hookers, many of them young and beautiful, look terrific.

Castro may still be in power, but the ladies of Havana have taken over the streets. While El Comandante stays out of sight, the hookers parade like spandex-panted queens of Sheba. A power unto themselves in their regal gilt and glitter, they scorn the respectable conventions of their trade. They do not restrict themselves to the usual hours; they are there night and day. Nor do they hesitate to approach men accompanied by women -- as if selling you flowers, or spare tickets for the theater.

It is strange how quickly you fall in with the light, amoral mood. You do not think, let alone say: ``I know that you've been driven to this; that the average wage is the equivalent of $20 a month, that the peso is a souvenir currency, that there is no decent food or medicine for the kids. But there must be something else you could do?''

``Like what?'' they might say.

Looking at Cuba's shattered society, you would be stumped for a reply.

This gaudy bartering of flesh, this carnival of prostitution, takes your moral breath away. After all, the carnival is laid on, in part, for you.

After you have been genially accosted a dozen times in a day you feel that you should make your excuses for not joining in: ``Look, no offense, but not right now. It is, after all, 1 a.m. Have a good day and viva Cuba.''

Sometimes there are schoolgirls among them. Then the carnival spirit reaches a low. The girls appear by the roadside at lunchtime in their short fawn skirts, and again after school hours, when trade is picking up.

There are child prostitutes the world over, but seeing them come to the job straight from school, complete with satchels, somehow makes it worse. The neat uniforms are suddenly suggestive. The girls -- completely matter-of-fact -- seem to know it as well.

One day I saw a man on a motorcycle pull up, select a girl from the line, and motion her over.

The girl laughed, hopped on the bike, waved goodbye to her school friends and they roared off.

Thirty-nine years of socialist revolution: What is left? An immoral roadside transaction by a man who was in his 50s. Who was he? His bike was olive drab, with an official look to it. A party cadre, perhaps? Or an army man in civilian clothes? A defender of the revolution -- the revolution that, 35 years ago, brought the world close to nuclear war; a war in which Cuba would have been right on the brink, the first country to risk falling off the edge of the world.

It did not happen. But the Cubans are out on the edge again -- the sexual edge this time. Why did it happen here: near-annihilation and now this depravity? All this dancing on the edge?

This is a country in the last stages of dissolution, an imploding society where cynicism, despair and corruption are a way of life. ``Socialismo o Muerte'' -- ``Socialism or Death,'' say the faded placards. To judge by the state of the place, it would make more sense to replace the ``or'' with ``is.''

Now that communism has fallen in the mother country, Soviet props to the Cuban economy have been pulled away. Gone are the Soviet advisers, technicians and army personnel. Left behind are their crumbling barracks, rusty Volgas and Ladas, broken-down sugarcane harvesting machines, a Soviet embassy which resembles a deserted watchtower and, of course, the Soviet-trained secret police who protect El Comandante.

A humbled Castro is an oxymoron. Still, at least he has given up poking the world in the eye with those missile-sized cigars. (They smoke them in Hollywood now.) And Castro spends more time on his travels these days, constantly on the move to avoid assassins. IS THIS CORRECT?

``Look,'' people tell you, indicating some closed road or group of loitering military, ``that is one of his places.''

But no one knows where he is. It is as if they were speaking of a past rather than an actual leader. The rambling braggadocio in public has gone the way of the cigars. When Castro speaks it tends to be in closed places -- and no longer for the legendary five hours, just a mere two or three.

When he broadcasts, fewer people listen. They know the show is over, so why wait for the big man to sing?

Totalitarian regimes are strong on euphemism. ``A special period'' is what the Castro government calls the country's disintegration, as if this were a passing phase of belt-tightening. Yet the resignation on the faces and the bartering of bodies for food tell a different story: that under the present regime there is no hope.

All you have to do is look around. Havana, with its Spanish-inspired architecture -- cool arched courtyards and magnificent public spaces -- is literally falling down. Buildings are boarded up. Others collapse in heaps of rubble, sometimes with people inside. In the center of town most of the big stores are closed, for the very good reason that there is nothing much to put in them.

There is a picturesqueness about this desolation and decayed grandeur, like a Pompei struggling back to life. You feel as guilty enjoying a sunny walk among the ruins as you do for not handing out dollars to every begging child.

For a big city, the air of Havana is surprisingly clean; there are few cars. Those on the road -- 40-year-old Chevrolets or Pontiacs, rattling and bumping along, the drivers peering through half-shattered windscreens as they brake on their gears -- are like the Cubans themselves: a miracle of adaptability. The motorways are empty, except for peasants standing (illegally) by the road offering six-foot strings of garlic, enough to last a year, for 20 pesos ($1).

In this blitzed economy, tourism seems the only hope. It is rising by 25 percent a year, mainly on the superb beaches of Varadero a couple of hours from Havana. Tourism has almost overtaken sugarcane as the country's biggest foreign currency earner. Some hotels have been modernized and offer passable service (if only just passable food).

But it is hard to see how tourism can develop successfully in an authoritarian state. The authorities are not endowed with the fabled Cuban charm. Coming back from a swing round the countryside with a Cuban friend, we were surrounded by police; my friend was questioned.

Pick up a schoolgirl on the street and nobody gives a second look. Ride in a local car and there is trouble.

Castro offers plenty of contradictions. He wants more tourists. There are not enough hotels, but Cubans are forbidden to put up foreigners in their flats or to use their cars as taxis. ``Family restaurants'' are allowed, but there is no food except on the black market. Cuba is proud of its intelligentsia yet reduces them to driving taxis. Cuba has a considerable pharmaceutical industry but no medicines for its people.

Australians say, to convey astonishment: ``You wouldn't read about it.'' Looking at Cuba's exuberantly decomposing society, you realize that you have: in Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera. The power of his masterpiece lies in its image of love holding its own in a diseased society, of humanity eternally lifting its head above the surrounding sickness.

That Garcia Marquez -- a friend of Castro and an apologist of the revolution -- wrote it can be seen as either entirely natural or hugely ironic.

It is simple to state what Cuba needs politically: an end to dictatorship and the de-socializing of the economy. One day this has to come. The question is when and how?

Cubans whom I talked to believe that the choice is between the Czechoslovakian and the Romanian models: a velvet revolution or vicious conflict between the Miami exiles and Castro's praetorian guard, in which old scores will be settled in blood and property reclaimed at the point of a gun.

At present the odds are swinging toward the Romanian option. A velvet slide to democracy, or anything like it, depends on loosening up the economy, easing political controls, foreign investment and the expansion of tourism. Yet barriers are high and rising in every area.

Far from easing the national straitjacket, Castro is making speeches warning against a free-wheeling economy and foreign contacts. ``Yes'' to tourist dollars, ``no'' to infiltration. The Helms-Burton law, which imposed penalties on foreign firms and individuals trading with Cuba -- especially if the trade or investment involved the assets of the exiles -- could frighten off the joint ventures, mostly with European companies, which were beginning to be signed.

As for tourism, there was nothing velvet about the bombs (assumed to be partly financed by exiles from Miami) that recently began to go off in Havana's hotels.

Cubans are trapped. Even assuming that Castro is spirited away in a bloodless coup, and Cuba is set on a fast road to democracy -- what is to become of the country?

It doesn't look forward to becoming an economic suburb of the United States -- an island at the end of a one-way causeway of cultural and financial influence. But if not the capitalist model, what other?

In the eyes of a generation, Cuba represented not only a new path for the Third World, but a turning away from the United States toward a bright new dream: socialism in the sun. What form will the counter-revolution take and when will it come?

In Cuba, in concentrated form, we see a world on the turn: from harsh constraint to frenetic freedom; from state control of the means of exchange to a market of desires; from inhuman systems of belief to a dehumanized hedonism.

Cubans have a particular pathos and you can get caught up in their story. The more you hear of it, the more their story sounds like a dramatized narrative of the 20th Century itself.

Copyright (c) 1998, Prospect Magazine